Bee Friendly: How We Created a New Food Quality Standard Beyond Organic & Non-GMO

Honey bees are known to be essential to human life. They pollinate 70 of the top 100 human food crops and perform about 80% of plant pollination worldwide. In fact, one in three bites of food that you eat is thanks to honey bees, who pollinate fruits, nuts and vegetables known to support a wise conscious lifestyle. Without these powerful pollinators, life on earth as we know it today would be much different. It is possible that human beings would not even exist today.

To say we rely on the pollination efforts of bees to sustain our food supply is an understatement. But the importance of honey bees was not brought to the mainstream until the late 2000's, when a serious bee plague emerged: Colony Collapse Disorder. Honey bees were dying off at an alarming rate, with bee keepers seeing 30-90% of their bees going every year. By 2008, we had just 2.4 million bee hives remaining, a 60% reduction since 1947. People were waking up to the importance of honey bees, and here at Life Basics, we made a commitment to help save our pollinating friends.

What was killing the honey bees in the late 2000's?

The collapse of honey bees in the late 2000's was linked with a variety of causal factors - pesticide use, air pollution, bee habitat destruction, global warming - which are all connected to one main cause; modern industrial agriculture. Chemical companies spent millions of dollars on attempts to disprove links between bee colony collapse and the increased use of pesticides worldwide, but no PR team could cover up reality: scientists found over 150 chemical residues in bee pollen.

At Life Basics, we are no strangers to the harmful effects of poison intake on human health, but seeing the impact that pesticides could have on honey bees and the important role they play on people and planet inspired us to set a new standard in food quality. We would never sacrifice our values. We decided then that we would forever create products that go beyond Certified Organic and Non-GMO Verified standards. We made a commitment to #BeeFriendly.

Bee Friendly means that a product is 100% Certified Organic, Non-GMO Verified, Fair Trade (if applicable), pesticide free, and chemical free. It might seem impossible to achieve such quality, but we are not willing to accept anything less. We have personally visited every single source of our product ingredients; from China to India to Brazil to Hawaii; from tea to spices to lemon juice to honey; to ensure that all of our products are 100% Bee Friendly.

Some people think we are crazy, but we are serious about our Bee Friendly Commitment: